Parisio’s wise and moving words emerge from his training as a naturalist, teacher, journalist, and conservationist. This is a book of poems written by a poet who pays keen attention to the natural world that is quickly being destroyed. It is an important book for our time.

“Parisio’s poems are striking… [his] work is more than promising: it is compelling. It will last.” –Grace Schulman

Richard Parisio has worked as an interpretive naturalist for 40 years and is a nature columnist for the local paper in New Paltz, NY. His work can be found in three regional anthologies, as well as The Kerf, Spillway, and Common Ground Review, among other journals.

At my doorway, I release you,
confident you won’t return. But go
for me. Go where the forest
hides its secret lives and deaths
in soft nests in the leaf mold.
Sun-blind like the stars,
we are flooded with daylight.

After the great flood, animals,
first one kind, then another,
were sent for a particle
of earth to make the world again.

Today it’s you we chose–
go down, go down, for all of us,
headfirst into the dark.